What if Ashbery were influenced by Tate, and not (just) the other way around? I certainly see a certain kind of Tate-like zany anecdote going on in Ashbery, but the latter lends more gravitas, as well as more sheer funiness, to these narrative scenarios. And Tate tends to make an entire poem out of a single anecdotal situation, whereas Ashbery will construct a narrative out of several such premises, linking them by some unseen metaphorical process and thus increasing the level of complexity. Two poets quite similar to each other, one relatively easy and the other relatively difficult. One could train a reader to read Ashbery by first introducing Tate, then giving incremental doses of shorter Ashbery texts until the transition is complete.